Government budgets are typically quite complex and extensive in scope. For example, the State of Florida has fiscal year 2013 budget of $70 billion spread across many agencies. Initially, when the budgets were first digitized, there was little standardization and little transparency. In other words, only those with an intimate understanding of the budget could distill anything more than generalities.
Eventually, accounting codes were standardized in the State of Florida Budget, which aided in the digitization across different agencies. Nevertheless, each agency maintained their budget system individually, leading to reduced interoperability. These budget systems were often housed on mainframes, with program files being difficult to access and manipulate. Another drawback to these individualized systems was that their use required extensive training and a background in the budget system. For elected officials, a staff was required to mine data as desired. Moreover, for a person outside the government, it would be virtually impossible to obtain such data in a desired form.
In the State of Florida system, operational systems data for state personnel, accounting, budgeting, planning, and contracts are housed in separate mainframe computers that are not linked together and are incompatible. With recent laws, many governmental entities are now obligated to provide public access to many of these same budget systems. Moreover, this same access may need to be provided in an online interface that may be navigated by the public.